‘Wood As Bones, Light As Flesh’ Light & Sound Sculpture

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This sculptural installation, featured at Mapping Festival 2011, was developed with Ilan Katin, Fred Bordfeld and Matthieu Borrell as FAIL Collective. The piece is a progression of the woodsticks surface-mapping that Fred and Ilan have previously built together, with a soundtrack composed by Matthieu. Ilan approached me with the idea to develop the wooden structure into more of a narrative device and together we worked on a concept for Mapping Festival which would also utilise the environment in which the structure stood.

As a narrative device the existing wooden structure is very physical and to me somehow all about surface; what is spoken.. Ultimately I am more interested in what is left unsaid, this vast world that exists between our words, that can never be adequately communicated and yet contains and betrays the sum of our experiences.

In addition to projecting content onto the walls, i became interested in working with the shadows in the room. Although the structure itself is tightly projection-mapped and casts no shadows, if you shoot secondary footage through the frames of the structure you end up with basically the same thing. My idea was to break down the integrity of these shadows – adding new elements, animating what should be static, confusing what was and was not present within the space. That is, revealing all that the structure was unable to say.